Sunrise of Vancouver | May 2026
Edward Li (Co-President of Speak With Arts)
Returning to Sunrise had been something I was looking forward to. Several months earlier, our first performance there had changed the way I thought about feedback and how we listened to residents. After that visit, residents told us that they would like to hear more familiar jazz, so when we began planning the return, I wanted the new program to respond directly to that request.
Exam season made it harder than usual to recruit enough jazz performers, and it would have been easier to design the concert around whoever happened to be available. Instead, we continued working around the residents’ request and built the program around music they had asked to hear. For me, this was a different kind of feedback loop. Rather than only gathering reactions after a performance, feedback from the first visit was now shaping the next one before it even began.
By the week of the performance, I had designed the program and prepared the materials, including the set list, host script, research-sharing segment, feedback materials, and notes on how the different parts of the event should connect. However, a sudden illness shortly before the concert meant that I was unable to attend.
I was used to being involved in both designing and carrying out our programs, so handing everything over to another Co-President felt uncomfortable. At the same time, having the program written out in detail meant that I could explain not only what needed to happen, but why each part was there. The research-sharing segment, for example, was not separate from the performance; it was meant to introduce ideas about music, memory, and emotion that could give residents another way to think about what they were hearing.
After the performance, I heard back from the performers, parents, and other team members who had been there. They described residents applauding enthusiastically, cheering after familiar songs, smiling, and responding especially strongly to recognizable melodies. I was also told that the Sunrise recreation coordinator introduced Speak With Arts warmly and referred to our previous visit.
Because I had not been in the room myself, I was careful not to draw too much from secondhand descriptions. Still, the feedback suggested that returning with the jazz residents had requested was well received. More unexpectedly, the experience made me think about something I had not considered when designing the earlier programs: whether Echoes of Memory could still work when I was not there to carry it out myself.
Until then, I had mostly thought about improving the program by changing its content, feedback methods, or interactions with residents. This experience introduced another kind of flexibility. A program also needed enough structure that someone else could understand it, carry it forward, and still preserve the reason each part had been designed in the first place.
For the first time, I began to see a difference between planning an event and building a program. An event can depend heavily on the person who organized it being there, while a program needs a structure that other people can understand and continue. The host script, research-sharing materials, feedback plan, and notes had originally been tools that helped me organize the performance. In my absence, they also became a way to pass the program on.
I still wished I had been there, especially after spending so much time preparing the return to Sunrise. However, hearing how the other Co-President, performers, parents, and volunteers carried it forward made the disappointment feel different. Echoes of Memory was beginning to become something that did not depend entirely on me, which made me think more seriously about how a program could continue to develop even as the people leading it changed.